Glenn Greenwald thinks the New York Times is headed for a downward spiral after the firing of executive editor Jill Abramson this week.

“I think of all the executive editors of the New York Times, at least in recent history, or I’ll say in the last 10 years since I’ve been paying extremely close attention to how the New York Times functions, Jill Abramson was probably the best advocate for an adversarial relationship between the government and the media,” Greenwald said Friday in an interview on Huffington Post Live.

“By contrast, her successor Dean Baquet does have a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American national security state,” Greenwald added.

Greenwald has a dog in this fight. The writer was one of the journalists to whom former NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked classified documents on government surveillance in 2013, and his paper, The Guardian, was willing to publish them despite potential political repercussions.

Without a strong watchdog like Abramson at the top of the Times, Greenwald said, the nation’s largest newspaper runs the risk of folding under government pressure.

“If [Baquet’s] past record and his past actions and statements are anything to go by, I think it signals that the New York Times is going to continue to descend downward into this sort of journalism that is very neutered and far too close to the very political factions that it’s supposed to exercise oversight over,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald was on a press tour to promote his new book about Snowden, “No Place to Hide.”